Today's Tidbit... Medical and Law School Football Teams

College football barred professional athletes early on but took a bit longer to agree on the other professionals, that is, students in the professional schools of medicine, dentistry, and law. Whether professional students should play collegiately was a contentious issue in the 1890s as colleges increasingly grew into universities with graduate and professional programs.

Penn was the early target of these challenges since it was the largest university in the country and had multiple professional schools. They also drew attention by hiring Edward Wagenhurst as football coach in the early 1890s after he played football at and graduated from Princeton. Upon entering graduate school at Penn, he was the player-coach for Penn, which other teams found objectionable. His situation and others led to conference rules banning graduate or professional school students from participating in varsity sports.

The problem with such bans was that medicine, dentistry, and law were often undergraduate courses of study before WWI, so undergraduates entering professional schools were often barred from playing for their college teams based on their conference and school rules. This situation led students in the medical and law schools to form their own teams. Utah, for example, fielded a varsity football team and had separate teams for their medical and law schools. Likewise, USC fielded a law school team early in the last century.